Explainer

Climate

Creed

Justice

Sustainability

9 April 2023

6 min read

When creation and justice converge

In a world of climate catastrophe, what does the message of Easter have to offer? N.T. Wright contemplates the hope of a new heaven and a new earth.

N.T. Wright

N.T. Wright is one of the world's best-known theologians and currently a senior research fellow at Wycliffe Hall at the University of Oxford.

On a misty beach, people comb the tide line to remove rubbish.

A beach clean in progress.

Brian Yurasits on Unsplash.

What on earth might the Easter story have to say about our climate catastrophe? What does this ancient story mean to us today, who know that the universe is fourteen billion years old and that, according to the best predictions, one day entropy will have its way with our world, leading to the universe either cooling down as it expands or rushing back together as gravity reasserts itself: the big chill or the big crunch? And what more urgently, might it mean in a world where we have woken up not only to man-made climate change but also to frightening levels of toxic pollution, in our seas, in the atmosphere?

John’s gospel is one of the sources of that ancient story. And the way the author tells it, gives us an answer.

A new story reflects an old story

Like Shakespeare, John does nothing by accident. The way the author introduces the story of Easter reaches far beyond the central fact of Jesus rising again from the dead. John’s point is that with that extraordinary event a new creation is launched. And that means hope – not just for individual humans, but for all creation.

On the first day of the week, very early, while it was still dark. That’s how John begins the story. Twenty chapters earlier, at the start of his book, he deliberately echoed the start of the book of Genesis: ‘In the beginning was the Word’. He has told his story in a great sequence of seven ‘signs’, representing as it were the ‘week’ of creation itself. Now, with Jesus’ resurrection, a new week is beginning: the eighth day of creation, if you like.

It takes everyone by surprise. At the time, many Jewish people had longed and prayed for God’s new day to dawn, but nobody had imagined it would look like this – a young Jewish prophet announcing that it was time for God to become king at last, being brutally executed by the ruling authorities, and then rising again from the dead. The hope of ‘resurrection’, cherished by many Jews at the time, was the hope for all God’s people to be given new bodies to share in God’s new world, the world in which heaven and earth would at last become one. Nobody imagined that this might happen, in advance as it were, to one person ahead of time. But by the time John writes his gospel he has reflected long and hard on what it all means. When he says ‘On the first day of the week’ – which he repeats a little later, in case we missed it – he is pointing to the truth that Paul expressed when he wrote that ‘if anyone belongs to the Messiah, there is a new creation.’ With Jesus, and then with his followers, we see in microcosm that the new creation has been launched.

Back on earth

This truth, central to the early Christians, has long been obscured by the influx of Greek philosophy into Christian thinking. For Plato, and those Christians who looked to him to help explain their faith, the point of it all was not to renew the present creation but to leave it behind. They supposed, as many Christians do to this day, that the aim of the their faith was to go to ‘heaven’ after they died, where they would at last see God. But the central story of the Bible, stretching back into Israel’s scriptures but focused now on the story of Jesus, is that ‘heaven’ was supposed to come to earth. That, after all, is what Jesus himself taught his followers to pray. The point was not that we – or our ‘souls’ – would go and live with God. The point was that God would come and live with us. The ‘God’ in question is the creator God. His aim, emphasized repeatedly in the Bible, is to renew his good creation, flooding it with his presence ‘as the waters cover the sea’. That is the biblical hope, quite different from that of Plato and his followers.

St Paul insists, at the climax of his greatest letter, that this will happen through a powerful, convulsive, fresh action of God. All creation, he says, is groaning like a woman going into labour, awaiting the new world which is to be born. And he sees Jesus’ followers as themselves ‘groaning’ in their present suffering; a majority of Christians in Paul’s world, just like a significant number in our own day, were being persecuted for their faith, and Paul encourages them to see that suffering as part of the larger cosmic labour-pains. But then, he says, God’s own spirit is also groaning within us, so that the new world which is to be born will come by the same divine agency that raised Jesus from the dead. In fact, Paul’s claim could be summarized that way: God will do for the whole creation, at the last, what he did for Jesus at Easter. The message of the resurrection isn’t just about God rewarding Jesus for his own terrible suffering. Nor is it simply about there being hope beyond death for his followers. It is about new creation – a new world in which we are all invited to share, not just eventually but already in the present.

Looking at the evidence, at the present state of the world, it might indeed seem that the promise of new creation is just a fantasy. But the message of Jesus’ resurrection was never designed to fit into the expectations people already had. Everybody knew perfectly well that dead people don’t rise. The Jews believed that one day all God’s people would be raised because they believed in two things about God: first, that he had made creation and made it good; second, that he was committed to putting right everything that had gone wrong. Creation and justice converge at this point: resurrection and new creation.

But Jesus’ resurrection, bursting into the world unexpectedly, like an important guest arriving several hours early when the family is all still asleep, adds another dimension to this. In Jesus, God himself has come forward in time to meet his tired and groaning world halfway. When the early Christians tell the story, they indicate that this is above all else an act of love: of rescuing, re-creating love. And that love invites an answering love, which takes the form both of faith itself and of allegiance, personal commitment. It takes basically the same faith to believe that God will one day renew the whole creation, flooding it with his glorious presence, as it takes to believe that Jesus rose from the dead. And that faith is awakened, again and again, as people hear the news about Jesus and realise that it is a message of love, the love of the creator God for his wounded and weary world.

A community of care

With that faith, and that love, there comes as well a new vocation. If Jesus represents the long-term hope of God’s people arriving unexpectedly in advance, in the present time, then part of the point is to equip people who follow him with his own spirit so that they can be agents of new creation even in the present time. That means a vocation to be small working models of new creation: to engage in advance in the tasks of creation care and renewal, and to encourage those working to address the major challenges of global warming and pollution. We are meant to bring into the world such a measure of justice and beauty as we can, to model in communal and personal life what the creator God always intended and what will come to pass in the ultimate new creation. We are meant to be people of hope: not just people who are motivated by the personal hope of sharing God’s new world, but people through whom that hope comes true in the present time in a thousand living ways, all of them anticipations of, and hence signposts towards, that final new creation.

Article

Belief

Creed

15 April 2025

6 min read

This pub chat brought us to tears

In the debris of the Enlightenment there’s a rising warmth to the mystical.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

Four people sit round a pub table, some look animated, others pensive.

gaspar zaldo on Unsplash

I recently found myself sitting in an Oxford pub, crying with a man I barely know. And I wanted to tell you about it.

How did we, two almost-strangers, find ourselves crying opposite each other?

Well…

Oh, gosh. How do I say this? We were crying because we were talking about Jesus.

We’d both been spending the week at a gathering of academics in Oxford and one sunny afternoon, we, along with the other attendees, had wandered to one of Oxford’s effortlessly enchanting pubs. We ordered a couple of their finest IPAs and found ourselves perched next to each other. I quickly gauged that this guy doesn’t dabble in small talk, so, right there - sat in battered leather armchairs and surrounded by people - we spoke to each other about Jesus. Not in any kind of academic or philosophic manner; we just sort of shared what we think of him, what we feel about him, what we wonder about him.

Ten minutes later, we had demonstrably leaky eyes.

You see, my comrade in tears and I, we’re both Christians. Over the past two-thousand-ish years, that term has come to mean a number of things – it’s become a weighted word. But what I mean when I say that we’re both Christians, is that we love Jesus.

That’s so weird to say, isn’t it? I’m resisting the urge to polish that definition up, to mop up the whimsy and make it more palatable for you. My instinct is to reach for an academic reasoning, a profound way to make what I just said sound less weird. But I’m going to resist. I’m just going to let that seemingly absurd truth blow in the wind.

Can I let you in on something, though? Something a little vulnerable? I love Jesus, but I find him hard to talk to you about. One of two things tends to happen when I try, I get emotional, or I get embarrassed. Neither feels helpful.

Let’s start with the embarrassment, because it’s easier to explain.

We live in the debris of the Enlightenment. We’re materialists, rationalists, all that we see is all that there is-ists. We want certainty, we want prove-ability, we want to stand upon the solid ground of reason. We’ve spent the last century or two valuing cold, hard, facts – not warm, soft, inklings. We’ve repeatedly traded mystery for mastery. And, because of all those things, we’ve ushered in secularism. That’s what we call ourselves, isn’t it? Secular? Those who have outgrown their need of a cosmic saviour, those who have finally burst free of the God delusion.

This story, this event, it teaches me that everything can be mended, including me.

This is my context as much as it is yours, and so, with all of that swirling around me – with secularism acting as the societal stage upon which I stand - my belief in Jesus is odd. I have spent my life feeling deeply unintelligent for believing that Jesus was all that he said he was, I can’t deny that. Secular culture has often had me feeling as though I’ve pulled up a chair, ready and excited to play the game of life, only to find that I hold an old set of instructions. Secularism screams at me, points at me, makes me feel as though I’m wearing an outfit that went out of fashion two seasons ago. And so, much to my shame, I get embarrassed. I play its game, a game I wasn’t designed to play, and I lose.

And then there’s the specificity of Jesus, right?

Even in the corners of culture where secularism is losing its grip and there’s a rising warmth to the transcendent, mystical, unexplainable things – there’s still a guard up when it comes to religion. In many cases, rightly so. People tend to feel more comfortable in the ‘spiritual, not religious’ camp. There’s something self-preserving about allusivity, isn’t there? Saying that I believe in Jesus strips me of that luxury – my association with him means that I’m also associated with two billion other people, and that can be disconcerting. It means I have little control over how I’m perceived by you, nor how I’m represented by them. It also means that my experiential spirituality is housed within a specific story, a framework, a tradition – I don’t get to pick and choose. It’s an all-in kind of thing.

So, every time someone who doesn’t know Jesus wants to talk to me about him – someone like you, perhaps - all of the above does its best to shut me up. It mostly wins and I mostly fail you. If – on occasion – I am able to rip the tape of self-consciousness from my mouth, I get frustratingly emotional. And that reaction is slightly harder to explain.

I don’t interact with Jesus as a metaphor, an archetype, or a symbol. You may think me delusional, but I’ve decided to take him at his word, to live as if he was everything that he said he was – fully God, fully human, the whole she-bang. And I take the same approach to Easter – the festival that celebrates the thing I believe to be the truest – Jesus’ resurrection. His death and subsequent un-death, what T.S. Eliot calls: ‘the still point of the turning world’. What Dr Martin Shaw regards as ‘the most extraordinary act of love, so catastrophic in its beauty, we’re still in shock two thousand years later’.

The realness of it all moves me. It, just as Martin has diagnosed, shocks me. This story, this event, it teaches me that everything can be mended, including me. It brushes against my deepest longings, it silences my loudest fears. And Jesus, the God-Man at the centre of it all? I feel the truth of him in my bones, his love courses through my veins, his friendship makes my eyes sting.

I feel silly saying all of that – knowing how such sentiments have no home in the secular world we’ve built up around ourselves. And so, I feel paralysed by the need to boil it all down to ‘five facts that prove the resurrection happened’. But I just can’t seem to master it.

Instead, I wonder if it’s alright that the truth of the event is found in two near strangers inexplicably crying in a pub. Two near strangers being unspeakably moved by the real-ness, the here-ness of a man who was executed two-thousand years ago. Two near-strangers who – despite it going against their (or, at least, my) self-aware sensibilities - were forced to accept that their tears picked up where their words had left off.

Is that kind of proof acceptable to you? After-all, I’ve never known of someone to weep over a good metaphor, an intelligent myth, or a profound philosophy.

I’m not opposed to placing the claims of Christianity under the microscope, indeed, I do it myself (when you’re not around, obviously). I’m simply opposed to it being the only means by which we can assess its truth. Afterall, I’m never more certain of its truth than when the only thing I have to show for it is an embarrassing display of tears.

Celebrate our 2nd birthday!

Since Spring 2023, our readers have enjoyed over 1,000 articles. All for free.
This is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you enjoy Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

Do so by joining Behind The Seen. Alongside other benefits, you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing my reading and reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin
Editor-in-Chief

Give now